GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.3 Released

The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.3 “Twin Pines”, is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is intended for testing and hacking purposes only. You will need XFT2 and fontconfig to build it. Among the changes is Sawfish which has been removed completely and replaced with Metacity.

25 Comments

No “Bugfixes” item in the changelog? Feature wise I’m settled for a long time ahead here so I was hoping any and all releases from now up to 2.2 would be bug fixing.

2002-12-01 9:22 pm

Metacity sucks. It’s the least customizable window manager I’ve ever used. If I can’t have what I want, it’s no good to me.

2002-12-01 9:55 pm

Metacity is meant to be minimalistic and be not much more than a simple windowmanager leaving all the other stuff to Gnome. I think that is great design as it:

1) reduces the likelihood of errors in the window manager, and thus you get fewer X crashes

2) allows for configuration of gnome rather than the windowmanager. ideally this would mean that you could have the same rules for window focus, window raising and window positioning in all your window managers.

2002-12-01 10:14 pm

Sawfish is pretty much only usefull for freaks, and freaks know how to easily install and change a window manager. That said, I’m a freak, and love metacity 🙂

2002-12-01 10:28 pm

Sawfish is still being maintained, and you can download and install it if you want it.

2002-12-01 11:45 pm

Once upon a time with Gnome you discovered choice…

now only ONE window manager… choice is gone…

Now I am using KDE but i do not like it.

I liked very much gnome 1.4! Can someone stop the time please???

2002-12-01 11:48 pm

Looks nice. Finally, a use for Trebuchet MS. (You can tell that I’m not a Linux user because I don’t really care about anything else but the screenshots :-Þ)

2002-12-01 11:52 pm

You can still install Sawfish you know (it’s still being maintained). Or you can use another window manager. The only thing that changed is that the default window manager is now metacity instead of sawfish. Not really a big change, as most distributions did that anyway.

2002-12-01 11:54 pm

So, when will we see a global menubar (a la mac/next) in gnome/gtk+ ? (I want my screen real estate back!) At least make it optional…

2002-12-02 1:27 am

“So, when will we see a global menubar (a la mac/next) in gnome/gtk+ ? (I want my screen real estate back!) At least make it optional…”

A global menubar would be a terrible idea for an X-based desktop, since one is likely to be using apps built against multiple toolkits, some of which would be able to use the global menubar, and some not. It’s not like on the Mac, where there is essentially one set of toolkit primitives (buttons, menus, toolbars, etc.) accessed by multiple APIs such as Carbon, Cocoa, or Qt. On X, it just wouldn’t work.

2002-12-02 2:02 am

I’ve been using gnome2 from Debian Sid lately, and have grown to appreciate Metacity. Yeah, it’s less customizible. But I haven’t had it break nearly as much as sawfish did. Until I started using Gnome2 on all my *nix boxes, I’d go back to Enlightenment and ditch Sawfish. My only gripe with Metacity is that default “Atlanta” theme. Ugh.

2002-12-02 2:09 am

I already posted this in the comments for the last release I think, lol… but yeah. The configurability is still there. You can even run gnome2 using kwin from KDE3 as your window manager if you so desire. you can even use sawfish or metacity UNDER KDE3. Since I didnt offer much information in my previous post, I guess I should do so now and I will.

In the Gnome2 session script (for those that use GDM/KDM/XDM/whatever) there is a check for a personal .gnomerc, which it will then run instead of the system-wide gnomerc if found. If neither are found it will simply run gnome-session, which you will need to start at the end of your gnomerc, but only after setting your window manager preference. How? copy the system-wide gnomerc to .gnomerc if you like your sysadmin, defaults, or setting up ssh-agent and then add something like the following to the top of the file:

WINDOW_MANAGER=waimea

or just make a file containing that and then a line running gnome-session. If you are a startx kinda guy, use .xinitrc instead of .gnomerc and bam. waimea gnome2 goodness. eaaaaasy.

To do the same in KDE3 you need to edit startkde. nano -w `which startkde` or similar as root and replace your normal ksmserver line (at the end right before kdeinit_shutdown) to instead read something like:

Editing the systemwide startkde might not be a good idea ™, so for the startxers just plop that into xinitrc. I dunno for xdm/kdm/gdm/wdm/etc what you would need to do….

And I have succeeded in creating yet another post too large for it’s own good. At least it’s the first on this site. ^-^

-LV-

2002-12-02 2:16 am

You have the option of doing this with KDE btw. But it will only apply to KDE apps. So, unless you use all KDE apps, it would be more of a way to waste screen real-estate than save it.

The gnome2 panel steals the same part of the screen as a mac menu-bar, if that helps any…

-LV-

2002-12-02 4:44 am

acme looks like one of the best new features..

2002-12-02 7:27 am

.

2002-12-02 7:43 am

Is there an official position on what is being done about the global menu option? Gnome2’s menubar already takes up space, so it’d be nice if I could fill it with a program’s menu. I’m actually surprised that this isn’t an option in GNOME yet considering how GNOME seems to follow Macs more closely than it does Windows and KDE has had this option for a while (albeit not very nicely… you can’t add other applets to the top panel that has the menu on it). It’d be nice if someone made an applet that swallowed the menu so that it could be easily moved around…

2002-12-02 7:53 am

Ali (alias IHatelain). I know that you are only a kid but why do you hang around adult sites and make silly trollish OT comments. I can see that you’ve decided to take on a personal war against GNOME for whatever selfish reason. You don’t have to like GNOME, many people don’t, but you don’t have to swear by your ass to tarnish its image every chance you get.

This is not TOYSRUS you know? So make a grown-up statement about the story if you must comment.

2002-12-02 9:18 am

Minkwe, you are one of those gnome users that need to get hit into the face for being really stupid. Why do you post names of people on all kind of places without proper prooves ? I’m following this kind of personal attacks of certain people for quite some time now and I really start puking now. Always the same 3-4 people that put Ali’s name into dirt for nothing. If you can’t proove it then simply shut up but doing things like this are in no way acceptable. You can’t simply go out and put every shit onto Ali’s back. I think that Ali is quite right by leaving such a sucking and retarded community as the gnome one.

2002-12-02 9:25 am

I’m running gnome 2.0.3 and KDE 3.0.5. I use konqueror as my filemanager. Much better than nautilus at the moment. It runs really stable with metacity. Just tell it to run startkde when gnome starts up and configure nautilus to do nothing. I’ll see how well this works with RedHat 8.0 tomorrow. I want to try KDE 3.1 and GNOME 2.1.3 as soon as possible. There are some very nice improvements being made to both user environments. I neeed tabbed browsing in konqueror. Its so painful without it. And I’ve noticed a bug or two between them, probably something to do with my configuration.

2002-12-02 9:57 am

minkwe it is quite clear for all of us that you are just a stupid retarded. NOONE gives you the right to put real names. Consider yourself lucky that Ali is wise enough to fly over. He was one of the major contributor of gnome and now just because gnome is getting a retared community and he left it, telling people to face the trouth, everyone is trying to shit on him. Stop acting as an idiot and open your eyes.

2002-12-02 1:11 pm

>> “Stop acting as an idiot and open your eyes.”

I think you should open your eyes instead because this Ali-guy really is the one and only troll here.

(and not only here unfortunately)

2002-12-02 2:42 pm

Once again have a Gnome/KDE news post become the grounds for KDE vs Gnome war… haven’t seen ONE comment from someone that actually have installed it and want to relay his opinion on it, that’s the kind of comments that belong here and that’s why I even bother to read all your stuff.

“I think that Ali is quite right by leaving such a sucking and retarded community as the gnome one.”

I mean c’mon… some mod have to make it as forbidden to start flame wars between KDE/Gnome/Enlightment/etc as it is with the Windows Vs Linux. 80-90% of the comments are off topic.

And to be ON topic, still waiting for 2.1.3 to pop up in the gentoo portage tree.

2002-12-02 2:46 pm

btw do tell how ITD is coming along ..

2002-12-03 1:07 am

I hope something will be done about keybindings before they release 2.2.

Strange that nobody seems to care that reconfigurable keybindings (point at a meny item, press a key, keybinding configured) are completely broken in mosts apps. There is an option to turn it on in gtkrc and GConf, but it doesn’t work for most apps.

I found this one of the best feautures in GTK 1.x. But apparently it’s “confusing” for some people, so it’s disabled for everyone in 2.x. Personally I find it more confusing that I can no longer press ctrl+a to go to the start of the line, because I can’t reassign “Select All”.